People who attended the recent Streaming Media Europe conference in London were treated to an executive overview of deploying Microsoft Windows Azure Media Services. The session was led by Xavier Pouyat, who explained the thinking behind Microsoft's cloud platform.

"What do our customers want? For many years we have deployed Smooth Streaming technologies and DRM technologies with customers such as Sky and Orange," Pouyat said. "Many of these customers ask for three main features. The first feature is the applications -- they want rich applications running on the web, running on many devices, and they want to bring out features like time-shifting, multi-audio, high-quality streaming, and so on. The play application is the most visible part of the service, and they want it to be able to run on many devices -- PC, Mac, smartphones, game consoles, and connected TVs."

So far, that's pretty standard -- publishers want rich applications and the ability to play on any device. But it's what goes on in the backend that drove Windows Azure Media Services development.

"The last part, which is important although the user doesn't see it, is the backend system," Pouyat explained. "They started to deploy on-site on-premises services or on a private cloud. We're seeing customers ask for better flexibility, more elasticity, and we think that the public cloud is a great way to achieve these goals."

Servers, then have evolved from on-premises solutions to private clouds, and, finally, are moving to the public cloud. For more on deploying an Azure solution, watch the full presentation below.

Windows Azure Media Services give content providers and media partners the nearly unlimited capacity of the cloud to cost- effectively handle a huge volume of digital media and make it available in the format that customers want, when they want it. This session will demonstrate the platform architecture and the services components available for building live and on-demand media workflows.